An Adventure
by rachelisafallenangel
Summary: [It's time for our favorite couple to have a mystery of their own.] Third genre horror, but only slightly. *Adopted from Cabitha!* R&R?
1. Prologue

**Hey! I have officially adopted this story from Cabitha who was kind enough to let me continue it! :) Hopefully, I won't mess it up and I can continue it as well as she had started it. **

**I do not own HOA (obviously, or Jara would be alive and well), or (technically) the first 17 chapters of this story. :P**

**Enjoy!**

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"Hey Jerome?" Mara whispered in the dark silence. There had been a power outage in the school, and most of the residents were "out" or "going for a walk" or "organizing a charity event to save the hedgehogs" Nina really was an awful liar. Jerome and Mara had been left alone in the house. Together.

Now, Jerome and Mara were not dating yet. They had just barely become friends in fact. But Jerome had found the secret stash of cookies, and Mara didn't like to be all alone in the dark in the house of Anubis. Jerome, for his part, didn't like being alone in the House of Anubis when there was an opportunity to be alone with Mara in the house.

"Yeah" He replied unsteadily.

"Where is everyone?" She popped another cookie in her mouth.

"Out." He said sarcastically "Taking a walk. Organizing a charity event." He scoffed.

"No, where are they?" She rolled her eyes. "All the time! They're always on a mysterious excursion." He smiled at her use of the word excursion, what a Mara thing to say.

Jerome couldn't explain it, now could he? That would destroy everything that the sibunas had worked for. But there were certain things that he could say, and those were the things that he did say.

"They're off, having an adventure aren't they?" He smiled and shoved another cookie in his mouth.

"Well, why do they get to have an adventure!" She giggled and threw her arms wide, "Why can't we have one too?"

Jerome smiled, Mara wasn't normally this…how to put this, giddy? It was like there were drugs in the cookies or something. Though clearly there wasn't. Maybe this was just Mara being happy, like really happy. He flattered himself that he was the reason that she was this way. But he knew that that probably wasn't the case.

"All right." He said "Let's have an adventure."

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**Review?**

**"Oh, I lost my fucking mind. It happens all the time. 'Cause I can't stand myself. I'm an asshole, baby. Oh, I'm fashionably late. I'm the one you love to hate. 'Cause I can't stand myself. I'm an asshole, baby." -Asshole, Ronnie Radke feat. Andy Biersack**

**Sorry for the words...I've kinda had that song playing most of the day... :/**

**-Rachel**


	2. In Which An Epiphany Is Had

**So I'm like spacing out the posting of these chapters so I have time to pre-write a few of the next chapters. :P**

**I've spent the last hour or so editing a few of the next chapters so... **

**Enjoy!**

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Adventures. It was a strange word, and the more Jerome repeated it in his mind, the stranger it seemed to sound. Would it sound better if he emphasized the _A_, he wondered. Perhaps his pronunciation of the 'vent' is what did it. He hung his head in his hands. He had promised Mara an adventure, and all he could think about was the way the word was pronounced, was it any wonder that she wasn't dating him?

Anubis House had its fair share of adventures, this Jerome knew well. But he had promised Mara her own, personal adventure story. Mara might have thought he was joking that night, but he wasn't. There had to be something, not some adult 'go get a job and watch it pay off' sort of adventure. A real, honest to goodness, adventure, (again he wondered, perhaps the 'ure' in his pronunciation of the word was off, maybe that needed to be emphasized?) And the thing was, the past years had shown him that these adventures existed, well and truly existed, and more than that, they were nearby.

Jerome had his own adventures sometimes, what with his dad and the jewel, spying for Rufus, and his pranking. But Mara needed a Mara tailored adventure. Something. There had to be something.

Jerome knew that the adventures of the house were pretty much Sibuna's domain, and silly as it may sound, he didn't want to encroach on their territory. He had already lost Alfie's trust; he didn't want to make it any worse for them. And even if Nina had left, the Scooby Gang wouldn't stop, and with KT and that Willow girl, their hands were probably full.

So the house was out of bounds, in this absurd game that he had begun to play. That left the woods and the school. Jerome knew that one couldn't just ask for an adventure to appear, there had to be some sort of first move, as though the elusive adventure he searched for was the entity playing the white pieces in some insane version of chess.

So Jerome thought to himself, he wondered if there had been any sort of hint at an adventure, anything at all that had happened to him that seemed at all mysterious? He thought of the woods and the school. But everything that came up was somehow Sibuna related.

The clearing in the woods: Sibuna.

The Frobisher-Smythe library: Sibuna.

The history classroom—now he was just being ridiculous.

He shook his head and pulled his red blazer over his shoulders, he wouldn't normally wear it, but it was cold. He walked—no, he sauntered down the hall to the dining room, determined to keep up his façade of cold indifference.

He nodded to Alfie as he passed. They had done a prank on the football jocks last week and they had bonded again. But their friendship had its limits now, and different infinities, as he preferred to call them. It seemed that they had opened the door to talking about other people, relationships, gossip, who to prank, how and why to prank them. They also had the same things in common as they always had; troubled home-lives, unrequited infatuation, a love of horror movies and aliens. But they had shut the door on the mystery, and on their respective relationships with Sibuna.

He saw Mara reading on the couch, he deduced from the length and age of the book that it was her favorite, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It occurred to him that had Mara been born a little later in July, she would have made a great Chosen One.

Jerome placed himself, with the catlike grace that only he possessed, on the couch next to her. He could see that she hadn't noticed. He smiled and pushed a little closer. Ah, now she noticed. But she made no indication that she wished him to leave, and so he pushed a little closer, and he gently put his hand on hers to lower the book so that they could share. She indulged this, though she quickly turned the page before she had finished. She wasn't going to wait up for him that was for sure. He smiled again, that was fine.

Jerome had started somewhere in the middle of a great action scene, and he couldn't really tell what was going on, or who he should be rooting for, other than Sherlock and Watson. Was the Scotland Yard on the side of Holmes? Because they were trading enough insults that it seemed that they were enemies.

At one point, one of the characters snuck down into an abandoned tunnel, and while Mara was reading Sherlock's deductions with her rapidly moving eyes, Jerome had stopped, and was thinking about the tunnels that he knew existed in the house; the tunnel down to the cellar, the tunnel from the library to the Mask. If there were that many tunnels in the house and in the library, why had there been no tunnels in the school, or under the woods?

And Jerome remembered vividly, when Alfie and him had played a prank on Ms. Andrews, how they had run and hid in a storage closet, but he remembered that the storage closet had been in between two identical classrooms (room 112 and 113 if you were wondering) and how he had been in both those classrooms, and he knew that the two classrooms hadn't quite met up the way they should've, and the closet was far too short to have made up that extra space. He was grinning now, because he also remembered how there was a top floor to the school, and how, strangely enough, the only door that anyone could ever find that was locked, seemed to be in the perfect place to be a stairwell up to the…top floor. Interesting.

"Jerome?" Mara asked worriedly.

"Mara, you know I love you, but you are interrupting my epiphany." He grinned down at her.

She laughed.

"What's this about an epiphany?" Two voices called down from above and behind them. Jerome and Mara started, looking back and seeing Alfie and Patricia watching them.

"My epiphany…" Jerome said grandly, sweeping his arms wide, "My epiphany, has absolutely nothing to do with either of you two!" But he leaned down and whispered in Mara's ear. "But it has everything to do with our adventure." He winked.

"You were serious about that?" Mara said disbelievingly.

"Oh Mara, when have I ever lied to you?" Mara opened her mouth to say that he had lied to her loads of times, that he had lied about his past and his reasons for being gone so often, but as she looked at him, so impishly cheerful, she couldn't bring him down like this. She couldn't ever have told him off when he looked so genuinely happy.

"I'm looking forward to the adventure then Jerome." She said calmly. And when he leaned over further and kissed her cheek, whispering, "It will be amazing," her stomach seemed to clench, not in an unpleasant way, and her cheek felt different from the rest of her face, as though it had suddenly regained the feeling of giddiness that she had felt so overwhelmingly the night before.

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**Review?**

**"(Wake me up) Wake me up inside. (I can't wake up) Wake me up inside. (Save me) Call my name and save me from the dark. (Wake me up) Bid my blood to run, (I can't wake up) before I come undone. (Save me) Save me from the nothing I've become." -Bring Me To Life, Evanescence**

**-Rachel**


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